One Hundred Years of Choking People

“I was born a son of bitch, and I’m going to die a son
of a bitch.”-- Gabriel García Márquez, “One Hundred
Years of Solitude”

In the annals of MMA pioneers, we are to first remember his cousin,
Royce
Gracie, who won three of this first four
Ultimate Fighting Championship tournaments and in the process
changed martial arts. When it comes to invincibility, no one holds
the myth together like his other cousin, the undefeated Rickson
Gracie. Such legends were granted status long ago. However, it
is time at last to acknowledge a king whose story is still ongoing.
Equal parts magic and realism, Renzo
Gracie’s MMA journey is linked to the history of the sport.

Another no holds barred tournament, the World Combat Championship,
was underway in Charlotte, North Caroline, in 1995 and another
undersized Gracie was expected to do big things. Unlike Royce,
Renzo scrapped the gi and the passive guard style, entering the
cage with white spandex shorts and an aggressive approach.

Judoka Ben Spijkers
stood across from him in the opening round and curiously kept his
gi on -- a move commentator Bob Wall called, “a tactical
disadvantage.” After those words and a few legal headbutts on the
ground, Renzo took Spijkers’ back and gripped a lapel choke.
Spijkers tapped, but Renzo held the choke, forcing referee Cecil
Peoples to step in. When he released and fell to his back, Renzo
kicked Spijkers before rising to his feet and stepping on the back
of his neck.

“I don’t know if that’s the sort of thing they are going to
appreciate here,” said commentator Todd Christensen.

There are two sides to every story, though. Not known then was that
Spijkers had allegedly spent the previous night prank calling
Gracie to keep him from sleeping. The day before this at the
weigh-ins -- where they first learned they would fight each other
-- Spijkers shouted insults at Gracie during the faceoff.

“My common reaction, would be at least a head butt on the bridge of
his nose,” Renzo said, recounting the incident in a Facebook post
while marveling at his self-control.

In the next round, Gracie once again won by submission. This time,
he was quick to let go of it and help his opponent off the ground.
It was a similar story in the final, where he submitted 6-foot-3
James
Warring. Renzo embraced the kickboxing champion in a hug, his
chin resting on top of his forehead. As for Spijkers, Renzo’s only
regret was not inflicting more damage, as he later learned that he
allegedly assaulted a female flight attendant the next day.

“He hit a woman,” Renzo alleged. “If I knew it, I would have broken
his arm so he would never commit a sin like that again.”

Like many of his family members, Renzo moved from Brazil to the
United States to open a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu academy. He was taken
in by New York, a city in which he likens walking the streets to
“reading a book every day.” The choice was clear back then. Despite
his duties of getting his academy off the ground and only having
white belts with which to work, Renzo continued his winning ways
into a Martial Arts Reality Super Fighting headliner, where he
faced UFC 6 tournament winner Oleg Taktarov
on Nov. 22, 1996.

“Alright, gentleman,” commentator Jim Brinson said, “set us up
quickly. What are we gonna see here right off the bat? Blood?”

After denying Gracie’s attempts to bring him to the ground,
Taktarov caught Gracie’s kick and tripped him to the mat. “The
Russian Bear” hovered above with his hands down, as Gracie
connected with an uptick to the chin. Taktarov staggered and fell
backward. Seated but still stunned, he was met with Gracie’s
charging right hand. “Who says they can’t punch or kick?”
commentator Dr. Alan Brackup asked. When Takarov came to his
senses, he felt his face, which was streaming with blood.

Like his other fighting cousins, Renzo soon caught the attention of
Pride Fighting Championships, where a Japanese-Brazilian
rivalry was reigniting. Leading the Japanese side was pro wrestling
star Kazushi
Sakuraba, who defeated Royce and Royler
Gracie successively -- a feat that was supposed to be doubly
impossible. Renzo, seen as a more modern and more complete fighter,
was given the responsibility of placing the family back on top.

A close, back-and-forth contest ensued, but in the final minute,
Renzo, believing he had done more, clung to a grounded Sakuraba to
let the clock run out. It was then that the clever wrestler made
his move and reached around for a Kimura -- a technique named after
Japanese jiu-jitsu master Masahiko Kimura for the hold he used to
defeat Renzo’s great uncle, Helio Gracie, some 50 years prior.
Sakuraba got to his feet with the arm in tow. Renzo circled to
escape, but Sakuraba followed. As they spiraled to the ground,
Sakuraba landed on top of Renzo with free rein to mangle his arm.
As his ligaments twisted and popped, Renzo watched and accepted the
punishment for his error. The referee stepped in to wave off the
fight with 17 seconds remaining. Sakuraba addressed the ecstatic
Japanese crowd. With his brother, Ryan Gracie,
holding his elbow in place, Renzo waited his turn.

“Many people make excuses when they lose,” he said. “I only have
one. He was better than me tonight; and the only gift I can give to
him is to say that he is the Japanese version of the Gracie
family.”

It was a moment about which Renzo would be asked for the rest of
his career.

“My whole life I wondered if I would or not [tap out],” Gracie told
MMAFighting.com, “so what Sakuraba gave me was something I will
cherish for the rest of my life.”

A photo of the fight hangs on the wall of Renzo’s academy, where by
this time Brazilian jiu-jitsu was having its own surge in
popularity and he had more than white belts with which to work.
There was a dedicated purple belt named Matt Serra,
whom Renzo made an instructor after telling him to quit his night
duty job. Ricardo
Almeida, a talent Renzo first spotted at age 13 in Rio de
Janeiro, made the move to New York. Then there was the former
bouncer, John Danaher. Before his Danaher Death Squad started
turning the Brazilian jiu-jitsu scene on its head, he was testing
new techniques that worked on everyone but Renzo.

However, as Renzo’s influence grew, so did his losses. It was one
thing to defeat larger opponents with little to no understanding of
jiu-jitsu, but it was another to face the new breed of fighters
that now entered the sport. After his loss to Sakuraba, Renzo
suffered a knockout loss at the hands of former Olympian Dan
Henderson and then lost two of his next three. An aging fighter
fading out of sport was presumably how B.J. Penn’s
father saw Renzo when he called to offer him a fight with his
son.

“That was the biggest insult in my life,” Renzo said in a video
posted by MMAMania.com. He took offense on several fronts, and not
just because Penn was at one time a promising student training
under Renzo’s brother. “If I call someone to fight my son, I’ll
make sure that he’s a tomato can. I don’t want my son having a hard
day.” Despite recovering from an ACL injury, Renzo accepted the
fight at once and did so with the simple motivation to “land [a]
very good shot on his face, the round ugly face that he has.”

Renzo landed a few in the first round before taking Penn to the
ground. In the second, however, Penn connected on the fatigued
Brazilian. With the pro-Hawaiian crowd mocking Renzo by changing
his name, he survived to see the final bell. The unanimous decision
went to Penn. After the two men embraced, Penn turned to Renzo’s
corner to shake hands. Rickson, Ryan, Almeida and Serra all
passively obliged.

By 2006, stars like Penn were taking the sport to new heights and
new MMA brands sprouted in North America to take their stake. They
including the
International Fight League, a team-based organization for which
Renzo coached the New York Pitbulls. Like all promotions, the IFL
could soon not resist putting together their most sellable fight,
and paired Renzo with former UFC champion Pat Miletich,
the coach of the Quad City Silverbacks. A “60 Minutes” crew caught
up with the two as they prepared to fight each other and asked them
to explain the sport to a skeptical public that was only beginning
to catch wind of it. Renzo spoke with host Scott Pelley on the mats
in his academy.

Miletich echoed the sentiment, comparing boxing to MMA as checkers
to chess.

“There is so much technique involved that, to be honest, when I see
a good fight, I think it makes a Russian ballet look like
uncoordinated body movements,” Renzo said.

“That’s a tough ballet,” Pelly said, “a bloody ballet.”

“Yes,” Renzo said, “sometimes, but the blood is the sauce of the
whole thing. It’s not blood that’s coming out. It’s a little bit of
pride that you are putting out.”

The segment concluded with the fight itself and Pelley providing
narration: “Miletich seemed in better shape and was the heavy
favorite. Gracie, the jiu-jitsu grappler, wanted to fight on the
ground. Miletich defended against the takedown, but there’s a
saying in this sport: ‘There are so many ways to lose.’ Gracie
climbed the stronger Miletich like a tree and inch by inch improved
his position, until he had his arm around Miletich’s neck like a
boa constrictor. Tighter, tighter. It’s over.”

The segment then returned to the mats.

“People see fighting as an ugly thing, a thing that denigrates the
human being,” Renzo said, “but in reality, they see fighting in
everything,”

“Everything is fighting,” Pelley said.

“Everything is fighting, doesn’t matter what it is,” Renzo said.
“You wake up in the morning to get out of bed, it’s a fight,
believe it, so fighting is actually the best thing a man can have
in his soul.”

Renzo’s in-ring fights were at last going his way, as he bested
another two more former UFC champions, Carlos Newton
and Frank
Shamrock, in his next two appearances. Shortly thereafter, he
was enjoying his student’s success, as Matt Serra
knocked out George St. Pierre to win the UFC welterweight title.
Before the fight, Renzo told Serra to “go forward and see what
happens.” St. Pierre, who later trained under Danaher, would
eventually come to seek his own advice from Renzo before his
fights.

For years after, Renzo stayed away from the cage, until pride
called him back once more in 2010. Just like the last time he tried
to avenge Royce, it did not work out for him. Renzo faced former
welterweight champion Matt Hughes at
UFC 112. Despite not having done so much as a single chin-up in two
and a half years, Renzo fared far better than Royce -- until
conditioning failed him in the third round and led to a technical
knockout defeat.

“You have to understand,” Renzo told Ariel Helwani backstage,
“winning or losing, I was the happiest man in the whole world
inside that ring. I had a great time.”

Helwani asked him about the possibility of a UFC return.

“Oh, hell yeah,” Renzo said. “Now that we have the belt at 155
[pounds] and at 170, I’ll probably go to 185 or 205.”

One of Renzo’s students, Frankie
Edgar, had also fought at the event and upset Penn to capture
the UFC lightweight championship.

“This little Italian guy from Toms River, [New Jersey], is one
tough cookie,” Renzo said. “I knew he had a chance. I knew it.
Whatever he lacked in size, he has extra in heart, and he proved
that tonight.”

Renzo never did return to the UFC, but in time, the number of his
jiu-jitsu affiliates had grown to over 50; another student,
Chris
Weidman, became UFC middleweight champion; Edgar beat Penn
twice more; and the IFL, as well as most other major MMA
organizations, folded before Renzo fought again eight years later.
Yet not much had changed for him.

“In there, you learn a lot,” he told MMA Fighting ahead of his
fight with Yuki Kondo in
July. “I’m able to improve all those around me, not just as people
but as fighters with technique, from what I’m going to learn under
the stress and how I will deal with it. That knowledge and those
memories, it’s a chance to live years in minutes.”

On a Saturday in Manila, Renzo made the walk down the aisle at the
Mall of Asia stadium. Waiting in the cage was Kondo, another Pride
and UFC veteran. One Fighting Championship “Reign of Kings” could
have been a fitting end for Renzo, but he vowed that it was not a
retirement fight.

After a round of inactivity, the referee penalized both fighters
with yellow cards. During the intermission, Renzo’s concerned
cornermen showered him with advice. “Shut your mouth,” he said.
“Relax and watch. I’m ass whooping him right now.”

Renzo opened the second round talking to Kondo, moving forward and
throwing heavy punches. He dropped to his knees, grabbed Kondo’s
leg, moved to his back and then wrapped his leg around the Japanese
journeyman before tripping him to the ground. It was a technical
sequence that took about seven seconds to pull off and 51 years to
master. As Renzo put it in his post-fight speech, what came next
was “what my family has been doing for over a hundred years --
choking people.”

“I have to teach the young generation that actually when you are
over the hill is when you pick up speed: 51-years old,” Renzo said.
“If you believe you are old, you are old. If you believe you are
just a young kid like me, then that’s what you’ve got.”